Reasoning About Propositional Commitments in Dialogue

Abstract

This paper rehearses some arguments in favour of a normative, commitment based semantics for dialogue acts, as opposed to more familiar mentalistic accounts based on notions of belief and intention. The main focus of the paper is on identifying appropriate notions of propositional commitment and entitlement that can be applied to argumentation and dialogue modelling. A case is made for adopting elements of Brandom’s framework of normative pragmatics, modelling dialogue states as deontic scoreboards which keep track of commitments and entitlements that speakers acknowledge and hearers attribute to other interlocutors. The paper concludes by outlining protocols and update rules for selected dialogue acts.